Chuck Sweeny: Hillary backs Obama, or does she? Who knows?

Thursday

Aug 28, 2008 at 12:01 AMAug 28, 2008 at 10:06 AM

Hillary Clinton did exactly what she had to do Tuesday night, and not a word more, to preserve her status as a viable presidential candidate in 2012 or 2016. Her job was to thank her supporters and urge them to vote for the guy she almost beat.

Chuck Sweeny

Hillary Clinton did exactly what she had to do Tuesday night, and not a word more, to preserve her status as a viable presidential candidate in 2012 or 2016.

Her job was to thank her supporters and urge them to vote for the guy she almost beat: “I am a proud supporter of Barack Obama.” The common foe, she reminded her delegates and her 18 million voters, is Republican John McCain. “This country can’t stand four more years of the last eight years,” she said.

That was almost as good her inevitable bumper sticker sound byte: “No how, no way, no McCain,” which she followed with, “Barack Obama is my candidate.”

Clinton was poised, strong, supportive of her party and a political genius. While she repeatedly reminded people that Obama is The One, the Park Ridge native never retracted her primary election complaint about the South Sider — that he’s not ready to lead America and his only claim to fame is that once in 2002 he gave a decent speech. (Actually the speech was the keynote address to the 2004 convention.)

McCain has had great fun and some success with TV ads that rerun Hillary’s critique of Barack, as the GOP tries to convince disgruntled Hillary supporters to back the Arizona septuagenarian. Hillary did not rebut her earlier dismissal of Obama’s leadership credentials in Tuesday’s speech. But she did make a point of calling McCain her friend, and she praised to the wisdom and experience of Joe Biden, Obama’s vice presidential selection and a Senate colleague from Delaware.

What we are left with is that Biden is a capable leader and Obama gave a speech once. But just so you know, she wants to make sure you vote for the guy who gave that speech, because “Barack Obama began his career fighting for workers displaced by the global economy. He built his campaign on a fundamental belief that change in this country must start from the ground up, not the top down. And he knows that government must be about we the people, not we the favored few.”

Trying to figure out what Hill ’n’ Bill are really up to is like trying to explain the cosmos. If the universe ends somewhere, what does the boundary look like? And if there is a boundary, what’s on the other side? Infinity? Or is that part of the universe, too?

If I were Obama, I’d be awfully glad I did not have to follow Hillary on Tuesday. Obama is said to have written his speech by himself in a hotel room because he considers it lucky — he wrote his famous 2004 speech in a hotel room.

Whatever he says had better be good, and more impressive than Hillary’s speech. Doing that will take all of Obama’s formidable oratorical skills, and then some, because instead of wowing 20,000 inside the Pepsi Center, he’ll have to overwhelm 75,000 in an outdoor stadium. And as was said about another, more tumultuous Democratic convention in another era: The whole world is watching.

Chuck Sweeny at (815) 987-1372 or csweeny@rrstar.com.

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